NANCHANG, April 22 (Xinhua) -- On weekends, the once-abandoned cowshed in Miaoquan Village no longer sits quiet.
Young professionals arrive with their laptops in hand, ready for long working sessions at the window-side tables. A wall of books rises to the ceiling, while the glass beside it reflects the outline of the mountains outside.
A few years ago, this scene would have been hard to imagine. The building, nestled in a small village near Meiling National Forest Park in Nanchang, capital of east China's Jiangxi Province, had long been abandoned. Like many rural buildings that had outlived their original purpose, it became a storage space for various items after younger villagers left for work elsewhere and farming practices evolved.
Now it has been reborn as the Zai Fu Cowshed Book Cafe.
Traces of history have been carefully preserved. Some bricks in the remaining old wall date back to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), with the characters "Wanli" -- the reign title of the dynasty's longest-reigning emperor -- still faintly visible on a few of them. The rough old masonry now stands beside large glass windows that frame the lush hills.
Inside, the first thing visitors see is not a coffee counter but a wall of books.
That, for cafe manager Han Li, was the point.
"There are martial arts novels, history books and online literature. I chose all these books myself," said Han. When local officials first approached her in 2022 about helping to repurpose an unused village space, the original proposal was to open a teahouse. She declined.
"If we were going to do it, it had to attract young people," she said.
What emerged was not just a coffee shop, but a place built around books, mountain views and a slower rhythm than city life.
Han said she found inspiration in Bishan Village, at the foot of Huangshan Mountain in neighboring Anhui Province, where an old ancestral hall was turned into a bookstore and a former cattle pen into a cafe. The juxtaposition was exactly what she had been looking for. Back in Nanchang, she proposed something similar for Miaoquan. The idea was accepted, and the village's abandoned cowshed was given a new purpose.
At first, the public response was lukewarm. Posts on social media did not immediately translate into foot traffic. A week's promotion might not bring customers until the next. Villagers were also unconvinced.
"They looked at us like a group of children playing house," Han said. "They thought we wouldn't last."
Liu Taohua, a villager who often came to help clean the courtyard, could not see the logic either, believing that coffee was bitter and expensive.
However, Han kept going. She believed that if this place was going to survive, it could not rely on novelty alone.
Before opening, she recruited Ye Teng, a barista born in the 2000s who had previously worked at a chain coffee shop in Shanghai. Though the pay in the metropolis was decent, he said, the fast pace left little room for creativity, requiring drinks to be finished in a minute or two. He wanted somewhere quieter to spend time adjusting beans and developing new drinks.
Ye moved into a village house and has stayed ever since. Four years on, he is still there. He has won an award in a latte art competition, and several drinks he created in Miaoquan have gone viral on social media.
The cafe now fills up on weekends and can receive more than 200 visitors a day, with more than 60 percent being repeat customers. The more telling change, though, may be what kind of customers now show up.
Han said more visitors now come not simply to pass through, but to stay for hours. Some travel from cities such as Hangzhou and Xiamen, spending two or three days in the mountains, ordering pour-over coffee and opening their laptops to work.
Gao Dong, a villager, said he does not really understand the phrase "digital nomad." But he has noticed that more young people arrive with laptops and sometimes sit there for an entire day.
"These young people make the village less quiet," Gao said.
The shift has affected the village in more practical ways, too. According to Han, who has signed a 20-year lease agreement, the cafe pays annual rent to the village collective, and the money is directed to households previously lifted out of poverty. Villagers, she said, have become more supportive as they see that the business is tied to the village's reputation and brings tangible benefits.
What is happening in Miaoquan is not unique, although it is not entirely straightforward either. Similar "cowshed book cafes" have sprung up in rural parts of Anhui, Yunnan, Fujian, Zhejiang and Jiangxi. On Rednote, the Chinese lifestyle platform, posts related to "cowshed book cafes" have surpassed 100,000.
These places are not standardized chains. Their appeal lies partly in what cannot be easily copied: the mountain view outside a window, the texture of an old wall, the personality of the person running the place and the slow accumulation of trust with local villagers. In Miaoquan, the cafe's story is not simply about coffee, but about how an underused rural space can now begin a new journey.
"For a long time, the countryside was often seen as a synonym for backwardness," said Liu Jiansheng, executive dean of the Institute of China's Rural Revitalization Research at Nanchang University. Today, he said, villages are also becoming spaces for spiritual rest and cultural life.
This shift is central to why the former cowshed in Miaoquan matters. It is more than a cafe or a social media backdrop. It reflects a broader trend in parts of rural China, where the appeal of the countryside is increasingly shaped not only by scenery, but also by the quality of the visitor experience and the getaway it offers. ■
